M
mikerjohnson
I've got an issue on my home pc that is stumping me and need some help.
I just unpacked it after a move and turned it on Saturday night to see
if it survived the move. It booted up fine and I updated AV, Windows
Defender and all Windows security patches as well as firefox. All of
those required a few reboots, all without problems.
I left the pc on all night Sunday to run defrag. The next afternoon I
went to use it and noticed funkiness afoot. Firefox would not respond
to clicks as if I had no network so I pinged yahoo and it came back
fine. I closed ff and reopened and it was still messed up so I opened
ie which worked fine. Then it started to hang so I went to click start
so I could run a ping. The start button had no text. I clicked it,
then clicked run. Notice came up informing me that I could not create
a shortcut there. I closed ie and the text on the start button came
back, but got the same notice when trying to click run. I restarted ie
(rather than reboot) cause I needed some quick info. It started, but
the address bar, controls, etc that are usually on one line now took 3.
So, I rebooted. After looking for boot media in the cdrom, it moved on
to the hd. As soon as its done trying the cdrom, 5 strange characters
come up and it stops. Looks like windings type stuff - I remember an
arrow, some circle thing and it ended with an equals sign. The pc
isn't locked up though. Numlock, capslock still work and it restarts
with ctrl+alt+del.
So, I'm thinking my mbr got hosed. I boot up the windows xp cd and ran
fixmbr and fixboot. Didn't work. So I boot up a Windows 98 cd and ran
fdisk /mbr. Still nothing. Booted a Linux cd and looked at the
partition table - looks fine. Booted up XP cd again. Traversed the c:
just fine. Dir commands came back quick and looked good. Printed out
boot.ini and it looked fine.
I finally checked cables, but they were all seated well, but I
unplugged them and reseated them again anyway. I pulled out ram sticks
and tried one at a time. Neither helped.
So, I'm thinking maybe cmos settings got jacked. Went in there and
things looked the same, but I messed with a bunch of settings just for
fun. Turned off caches, changed hd addressing scheme (on chs and large
I only got no os found, not the 5 characters), changed ram speed and
nothing helped. So, I thought the cmos could still be corrupt - I've
seen that too. Moved the jumper to clear cmos, replaced jumper in
proper position and went through and re-setup the cmos settings.
Nothing. Same problems.
I had a second, old system drive in the box that wasn't connected, so I
unplugged the problem hd and plugged that one in. It started to boot
just fine before I hit the reset button. Plugged the other drive back
in and had the same problem, 5 strange characters and stops.
I haven't yet tried putting the drive in a different computer to see if
it will boot, but this thing is frustrating me. Any ideas?
Forgot to mention that while booted off the XP cd I ran a full chkdsk
with the surface option and it found no errors.
mike
I just unpacked it after a move and turned it on Saturday night to see
if it survived the move. It booted up fine and I updated AV, Windows
Defender and all Windows security patches as well as firefox. All of
those required a few reboots, all without problems.
I left the pc on all night Sunday to run defrag. The next afternoon I
went to use it and noticed funkiness afoot. Firefox would not respond
to clicks as if I had no network so I pinged yahoo and it came back
fine. I closed ff and reopened and it was still messed up so I opened
ie which worked fine. Then it started to hang so I went to click start
so I could run a ping. The start button had no text. I clicked it,
then clicked run. Notice came up informing me that I could not create
a shortcut there. I closed ie and the text on the start button came
back, but got the same notice when trying to click run. I restarted ie
(rather than reboot) cause I needed some quick info. It started, but
the address bar, controls, etc that are usually on one line now took 3.
So, I rebooted. After looking for boot media in the cdrom, it moved on
to the hd. As soon as its done trying the cdrom, 5 strange characters
come up and it stops. Looks like windings type stuff - I remember an
arrow, some circle thing and it ended with an equals sign. The pc
isn't locked up though. Numlock, capslock still work and it restarts
with ctrl+alt+del.
So, I'm thinking my mbr got hosed. I boot up the windows xp cd and ran
fixmbr and fixboot. Didn't work. So I boot up a Windows 98 cd and ran
fdisk /mbr. Still nothing. Booted a Linux cd and looked at the
partition table - looks fine. Booted up XP cd again. Traversed the c:
just fine. Dir commands came back quick and looked good. Printed out
boot.ini and it looked fine.
I finally checked cables, but they were all seated well, but I
unplugged them and reseated them again anyway. I pulled out ram sticks
and tried one at a time. Neither helped.
So, I'm thinking maybe cmos settings got jacked. Went in there and
things looked the same, but I messed with a bunch of settings just for
fun. Turned off caches, changed hd addressing scheme (on chs and large
I only got no os found, not the 5 characters), changed ram speed and
nothing helped. So, I thought the cmos could still be corrupt - I've
seen that too. Moved the jumper to clear cmos, replaced jumper in
proper position and went through and re-setup the cmos settings.
Nothing. Same problems.
I had a second, old system drive in the box that wasn't connected, so I
unplugged the problem hd and plugged that one in. It started to boot
just fine before I hit the reset button. Plugged the other drive back
in and had the same problem, 5 strange characters and stops.
I haven't yet tried putting the drive in a different computer to see if
it will boot, but this thing is frustrating me. Any ideas?
Forgot to mention that while booted off the XP cd I ran a full chkdsk
with the surface option and it found no errors.
mike